On MaltBlue.com today Matt has a new article posted describing why he thinks Kohana is a good alternative to the Zend Framework in some projects.

recently I've been doing a lot of research in to some of the best PHP frameworks and codebases, including Symfony 1 & Symfony 2, Drupal, CakePHP and Kohana for a technical documentation project that I've been working on. [...] Well, to say the least, I was really surprised at just how simple, lightweight and easy Kohana is to use. Wow, what a true breath of fresh air it is after using Zend Framework for so long now.

He talks some about the things he likes about the framework (including a well-structured configuration file and its overall speed) and includes a simple "getting started" tutorial. He shows you how to make a simple application that includes database support, caching and the MVC stack to display a list of users.